Wednesday, June 24, 2015

A recent report by Americans For Tax Fairness
looks at how Walmart, the world's largest corporation, uses a vast network of
subsidiaries and branches in overseas tax havens with two purposes:

1.) to minimize taxes
owed on its foreign operations.

2.) most importantly, to
avoid United States taxes on those foreign earnings.

In most cases, American
corporations set up subsidiaries in tax havens where they have little or no
business operations and very few employees (if any at all). These
subsidiaries allow corporations to maintain financial secrecy and are typically
used by both technology and pharmaceutical companies.

According to the report,
Walmart has a vast and very complex network of 78 subsidiaries in 15 overseas
tax havens as shown on this graphic:

Walmart has been able to
keep the existence of these offshore tax havens relatively unknown to the
general public; none of the 78 subsidiaries that go by such creative names as
Azure Holdings, Bounteous Company Limited, Main Street 824 (Proprietary)
Limited Sarl and MCLM III are disclosed in Walmart's annual 10-K filings with
the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. This means that
these entities remain invisible to anyone seeking information on corporate tax
avoidance. It is interesting to see how large some of these subsidiaries
are; MCLM III holds $31.6 billion in assets, 15 percent of Walmart's total
assets. The exact content of these assets is currently unknown but the
company paid $1.8 billion in dividends to the parent company in fiscal year
2013 and 2014.

Here is a listing of the
foreign tax havens used by Walmart, the number of Walmart subsidiaries in each,
Walmart's total assets held in each jurisdiction (where available) and the
number of Walmart stores in each:

You will notice that
there is not a single Walmart store located in any of the nations on this list
and that Walmart has $64.2 billion in assets held in Luxembourg where it has
zero stores. While Spain is not generally considered to be a tax haven,
it appears that it was used by Walmart to avoid taxes on its operations in
Argentina.

Here is a listing of some
of the countries in which Walmart owns stores (outside of the United States)
and the location of the tax haven parent company for each of the operating company
location along with the name of the tax haven parent company:

What this is telling us
is that Walmart has transferred ownership of these foreign operating companies
to its subsidiaries located in tax havens. It is important to note that
publicly available information does not allow the authors of this report to
determine whether or not Walmart's Canadian and Mexican operations are owned
through subsidiaries located in tax havens.

As you can well imagine,
Walmart's web of subsidiaries is very complex because the subsidiaries located
in tax havens are integrated into the company through entities that are
organized as limited liability companies (LLCs) or limited partnerships (LPs).
Both LLCs and LPs which can be either corporations or individuals located
anywhere in the world are used as conduits for moving earnings from one country
to another. For example, an LLC that is located in the United States can
receive dividend income from a foreign subsidiary and distribute those
dividends to a foreign owner without incurring tax in the United States as long
as the LLC's income is not gleaned from business activity that occurs in the
U.S.

Here is an example of how
Walmart uses LLCs located in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom
and how they are integrated into the aforementioned tax havens:

As you may have noted,
low-tax Luxembourg seems to be preferred tax haven for Walmart. According
to Deloitte, the headline corporate tax rates in
Luxembourg range from 20 percent if taxable income is less than 15 million
euros and rises to 21 percent if taxable income exceeds 15 million euros (plus
an Employment Fund surcharge of 7 percent). This is significantly lower
than the American headline corporate tax rate of 35 percent that Corporate
America likes to complain about endlessly. Since 2009, Walmart has formed 20 new
subsidiaries in Luxembourg including five in 2015 alone. This has allowed
Walmart to move in excess of $45 billion in assets into its Luxembourg
subsidiaries since 2011.

How does Walmart extract
these funds from Luxembourg? Documents suggest that Walmart is using
short-term, low-interest loans from Luxembourg. This is a similar tactic
that was used by Hewlett-Packard. The current
Internal Revenue code allows these loans to take place as long as they are
repaid within 30 days, otherwise they are deemed dividends that are subject to
U.S. taxes. During the first six months of 2014, Walmart took $2.4 billion
in loans from its Luxembourg subsidiaries at interest rates of between 0.25 and
0.28 percent. This allowed Walmart to borrow money (from itself) at
ultra-low rates at the same time as it avoids paying U.S. taxes on the
funds.

Walmart is far from the
only big American corporation availing themselves of this tax loophole.
The offshore profits of Corporate America has grown from $562 billion in
2004 to $2.1 trillion in 2015. This offshore hoarding began in 2004 when Congress approved
a tax break for repatriated earnings that allowed U.S. companies to bring home their accumulated earnings at a 5.6 percent tax rate. The recent
proposals from the Obama Administration that would see a one-time 14 percent tax on the trillions of dollars of
unrepatriated foreign earnings of American multinationals suggest that
Corporate America has been busy lobbying for changes that would allow them to
bring their earnings back to the U.S. without significant penalty. Just
in case you wondered, here is how much Walmart has spent on lobbying
in Washington since 1998:

Most of us have spent at
least some of our hard-earned money at Walmart at one time or another whether
we liked it or not. Walmart's relatively slim profits of $16.18 billion
on $485.7 billion in sales for the 2015 tax year show us that reducing its
tax burden is an important part of its ongoing strategy. Through the use
of tax havens, the massive corporate behemoth take can advantage of options
that are not available to its smaller, locally owned and operated competitors
to improve its bottom line and further enrich its key shareholders who are
already among America's wealthiest.

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About Me

I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.